Lung Cancer Health Center

Tools & Resources

High-Tech PET Scan 'Sees' Cancer Better

By
Elizabeth Tracey , MSWebMD Health News

WebMD News Archive

May 24, 2000 (New Orleans) -- Use of a radioactive high-tech scan called PET
may help patients with some kinds of cancer avoid unnecessary surgeries that do
not cure the disease. Two new studies presented here at a meeting of the
world's leading cancer researchers and doctors show that this new test, though
expensive, is much better at seeing lung cancer than the older CAT scan.
Researchers expect that PET will be as helpful for other cancers as well.

PET scans differ from conventional CAT because this newer test is better
able to detect much smaller, microscopic amounts of cancer cells that have been
left over after treatment and to verify that a suspicious mass is truly cancer.
CAT, on the other hand, is only able to detect larger masses, and only a
surgical procedure, or biopsy, can verify that the CAT-detected mass is
cancer.

A PET scan alone can verify that even small masses are cancerous because the
technique uses a type of sugar, or glucose, that glows. Cancer cells ingest
larger amounts of glucose than normal cells, so they glow "hotter" than
normal cells. So while CAT can identify suspicious masses based on their size,
PET scans can identify masses that are cancerous based on their behavior.

Researchers from the Peter MacCallum Cancer Institute in East Melbourne,
Australia, used PET to verify whether the lung cancer patients in their study
had successfully responded to their treatment with surgery, chemotherapy,
and/or radiation therapy. All patients had non-small cell lung cancer, the most
common form of lung cancer. Compared with CAT, PET was better at predicting
which patients would survive and in identifying which patients would need more
aggressive treatment to combat their disease.

Doctors usually treat non-small cell lung cancer with surgery only when they
think they can remove all of the cancer -- meaning when they don't think that
the cancer has spread, or metastasized, outside the lung. Doing surgery once
the cancer has metastasized does not benefit the patient, according to Michael
MacManus, MD, a research involved in the Australian study.